Prologue
Spring comes in waves. At first, unrecognizably. And then, unavoidably. And when it finally fully comes, we wake up.
We, the People. The sovereign. We tumble out of the stupor that is our sleep and exercise a power that is ours exclusively. We might exercise it well. Many think we would exercise it poorly. So when its first hint becomes clear, we should take steps to assure that we will exercise it as well as we can.
The first step is to name it, this, our power. For it is different from the ordinary power that gets fought over in the context of ordinary politics. This is the thing that the commentators miss. They see a fight between the Right and the Left. That is the game, and the frame, they understand. There was Clinton. His side got defeated (sort of) by George Bush. Then his side got defeated (or so we thought) by Barack Obama. Left versus Right versus Left versus Right, fighting for the control of government and of government policy. And even when there’s a fight that doesn’t actually happen in D.C.—the Tea Party or the Occupy Wall Street movement—the chattering classes squeeze that battle into a Left/Right fight within Washington. The Tea Party, the insiders insist, is just a mobilizing (and very effective) whip for the Republicans, the Occupiers still a mere hope for the Democrats. As if politics is only ever about the normal battle to determine which side wins control of an existing government.
But as well as the Left side and the Right side, there is an inside and an outside. There are those inside normal government (and their wannabes), who work to direct government policy or at least control government power. And there are those outside normal government, who want nothing of normal government save that it does its job and otherwise “leaves us alone.”
The outside spends most of its time ignoring the inside. Maybe once every four years it takes notice. Maybe in a catastrophe, or when some celebration rises above the ratings of 60 Minutes. But until then, the outside just wants to live its life. It wants to drive across a bridge without worrying about the engineering. It wants to believe that our kids are safe and that public education works. It wants to climb aboard an airplane without wondering whether the FAA is competent. It wants to know that there is a government that is at least trying to do what’s best for this nation. The outside wants to trust. It wants to trust that there’s an inside that’s at least competent.
The outside is us. It is the we who have other lives. The we who want to do different things. The we who find basketball or hockey more interesting than congressional politics. Or who believe that an afternoon helping at a homeless shelter or a morning at our church is a better use of our time than going door to door for a candidate for Congress. We, the outside, live our life (almost) never even thinking about this thing we call government—even though, for many of us, this thing called government is the single largest financial expenditure that we make every year. 1
But then something happens, and we can’t ignore the inside anymore. And then we start to wake up. Limbs twitch. Eyes open, ever so slightly. An arm moves, then a leg. And a lumbering and clumsy giant finally comes awake.
In our time, I mark the first such twitch in 1998. The insiders were obsessed with whether the president had had an affair with an intern, and then whether he had lied about it. The outsiders were mainly bemused. But after four years of a frenetic special prosecution, spending millions to suss “The Truth” about the integrity of the president, it became clear that our Congress was actually going to invoke the mechanism of impeachment—only twice credibly threatened in the history of the nation—to address this pathetic question. By then, most of us were simply disgusted. Not just with the president but, more important, with a system that had lost all sense of
Spring comes in waves. At first, unrecognizably. And then, unavoidably. And when it finally fully comes, we wake up.
We, the People. The sovereign. We tumble out of the stupor that is our sleep and exercise a power that is ours exclusively. We might exercise it well. Many think we would exercise it poorly. So when its first hint becomes clear, we should take steps to assure that we will exercise it as well as we can.
The first step is to name it, this, our power. For it is different from the ordinary power that gets fought over in the context of ordinary politics. This is the thing that the commentators miss. They see a fight between the Right and the Left. That is the game, and the frame, they understand. There was Clinton. His side got defeated (sort of) by George Bush. Then his side got defeated (or so we thought) by Barack Obama. Left versus Right versus Left versus Right, fighting for the control of government and of government policy. And even when there’s a fight that doesn’t actually happen in D.C.—the Tea Party or the Occupy Wall Street movement—the chattering classes squeeze that battle into a Left/Right fight within Washington. The Tea Party, the insiders insist, is just a mobilizing (and very effective) whip for the Republicans, the Occupiers still a mere hope for the Democrats. As if politics is only ever about the normal battle to determine which side wins control of an existing government.
But as well as the Left side and the Right side, there is an inside and an outside. There are those inside normal government (and their wannabes), who work to direct government policy or at least control government power. And there are those outside normal government, who want nothing of normal government save that it does its job and otherwise “leaves us alone.”
The outside spends most of its time ignoring the inside. Maybe once every four years it takes notice. Maybe in a catastrophe, or when some celebration rises above the ratings of 60 Minutes. But until then, the outside just wants to live its life. It wants to drive across a bridge without worrying about the engineering. It wants to believe that our kids are safe and that public education works. It wants to climb aboard an airplane without wondering whether the FAA is competent. It wants to know that there is a government that is at least trying to do what’s best for this nation. The outside wants to trust. It wants to trust that there’s an inside that’s at least competent.
The outside is us. It is the we who have other lives. The we who want to do different things. The we who find basketball or hockey more interesting than congressional politics. Or who believe that an afternoon helping at a homeless shelter or a morning at our church is a better use of our time than going door to door for a candidate for Congress. We, the outside, live our life (almost) never even thinking about this thing we call government—even though, for many of us, this thing called government is the single largest financial expenditure that we make every year. 1
But then something happens, and we can’t ignore the inside anymore. And then we start to wake up. Limbs twitch. Eyes open, ever so slightly. An arm moves, then a leg. And a lumbering and clumsy giant finally comes awake.
In our time, I mark the first such twitch in 1998. The insiders were obsessed with whether the president had had an affair with an intern, and then whether he had lied about it. The outsiders were mainly bemused. But after four years of a frenetic special prosecution, spending millions to suss “The Truth” about the integrity of the president, it became clear that our Congress was actually going to invoke the mechanism of impeachment—only twice credibly threatened in the history of the nation—to address this pathetic question. By then, most of us were simply disgusted. Not just with the president but, more important, with a system that had lost all sense of
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